Reading a biography of Camus, who looks and dresses like my maternal grandfather, who was born about 10 years later in southern Italy. It's only page 48, but it feels like I've been reading it for longer. As a young man, he has a deep sense of vocation, sleeps around, and dreams of living in Paris. In his “carnets” he complains of his own “disordered” life, and meditates on suffering and hopelessness. He marries a morphine addict, and tolerates her betrayals and deceptions.
Sometimes I think I need to write plays because I don't have any essential inwardness of my own anymore; I can only imagine other people's inwardness. As my own internal mayhem retreats from me, I might even be getting better at it: inventing the souls of fictional people.
“The genius,” Nietzsche writes, “is necessarily a squanderer. That he squanders himself, that is his greatness. The instinct of self-preservation is suspended, as it were. The overpowering pressure of outflowing forces forbids him any such care or caution.”
The tech paradigm of civilization, the San Francisco paradigm, denies death, and it denies inwardness. Because it denies death, it can deny inwardness that is generated by a reckoning with finitude. All there is, in this vision of life, is the body and the rational mind, which seeks to get the body to do what it wants. But that middle level isn't really there at all—that contemplative, soul level. Maybe the future can do without it; maybe the soul, as it was conceived of by Plato, is finally dying 2300 years later.
After 20 minutes of scrolling through Twitter, which is the only thing I scroll, it's hard to imagine that other people might have 4 or 5 apps on their phones, all of which perform the same anesthetic function, the same numbing function. One seems bad enough.
It's a lovely summer night in Bethlehem, PA. As lovely as I can remember—with just a hint of smoke from the Canadian wildfires in the air, which makes it seem like someone in the neighborhood is having an outdoor fire, which often they are.
I'm rereading Harold Bloom’s Genius and Pessoa's Book of Disquietude. I'm losing chess games; I'm writing; I feel very tired, but I don't want to go to bed. I don't want this to be the end of the night. I talk to the person I love on the phone. I think about how my own idea of love has changed so much, and how, recently, I'm returning to the romantic ideas I had when I was 22, only with the experience and, frankly, scars of 12 intervening years. Reason and romance. I think about how social media somewhat selects for idiots—meaning the wisest and most popular people on, say, Twitter or TikTok still are probably much less intelligent and wise than the person who chooses not to have no account at all, chooses not to speak in this digitally refracted way…. and that we haven't really fully reckoned with the difference between scale of expression and the actual value of expression, how we’ve confused scale for value. I think about